


Wished You Well

by obfuscatress



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Victorian, Growing Up Together, Letters, M/M, Wishing Well AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-08
Updated: 2014-12-08
Packaged: 2018-02-28 13:28:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2734322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obfuscatress/pseuds/obfuscatress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Victorian AU. When James Bond tossed a coin into an abandoned wishing well on his seventh birthday, he wasn't expecting to find someone in it.</p><p>Written for rerumfragmenta as part of the 00Q Reverse Bang Challenge 2014.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rerumfragmenta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rerumfragmenta/gifts).



> A big thank you to the artist, rerumfragmenta, who was a part of the whole writing process and feathercollection for BETAing this chapter. All remaining mistakes are my own.

Here is the original prompt by [rerumfragmenta](http://rerumfragmenta.tumblr.com).

 

* * *

 

 

_**Chapter One** _

_**No Wings For The Fallen** _

 

* * *

 

 

On the morning of his seventh birthday James Bond received the dirtiest silver coin his father owned with usual lecture, “Remember, James, a family is nothing without its roots and customs. Never abandon them, no matter how silly-”

“Oh, let the boy polish his coin in peace,” his mother cut in, “He shan’t be finished before sundown otherwise.”

He scampered off to the privacy of his fathers office with cloth and coin to polish his newest treasure in bleary winter light. He sat there for hours, revealing the detailed patterns in the late afternoon. It was just the tedious first step in an ancient family tradition, he knew, but the most important one nonetheless. Beaming, he held the coin out to his mother before supper. This year he was certain he’d done a good enough job for his wishes to be granted.

 

By five o’clock he set off towards the lows. It was not a long journey, less than half a mile, but it was enough for doubt to set in. James clutched the coin in his hands, afraid of losing it. On the hill a cold east wind blew in his face and a ghostly patch of trees unfolded in front of him.  Among them stood a crooked old well, the last mark of a small settlement that had vanished years ago. And in that old wishing well he’d now whisk his coin. What an odd tradition, James thought, to throw money away on one’s birthday. Yet he’d spent months planning what he would ask of this omnicompetent well. And there it was, the embodiment of the anti-climax between imagination and reality: a silent and unmoving pit.

“The one and only thing I desire is a friend,”  said he to the skew stones. With those words he tossed his coin in and clasped his hands in prayer, waiting for the sound of its safe arrival on the ground.

What he did not expect was a shout. “Help! Please help me!”

“Hello?” James peered over the edge into darkness, voice wavering in the echo.

“Sir, please help me.” The head of a boy younger than him, maybe four or five, appeared from the shadows.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Q. Please, I fell down this well last night and it is getting quite cold.”

Astonished, James stared down into the well. This was not how he had wanted his wish to be granted, nor did he believe it to be possible. After all this boy had fallen in the well on the previous night, before he had even set foot into the woods. “I’ll get my parents,” he said to Q and made haste to get back home.

 

* * *

 

“Maman! Father! There’s a boy in our well!” He burst in through the door, breathless after running down the hillside.

His father looked up from his book. “Don’t be silly, James. Why would anybody go to an abandoned well in the middle of nothing?”

“But-”

“You are imagining things.”

“I am not! His name is Q and he needs help to get out of there since the walls are too high for him to climb-”

“Enough of this nonsense!”

James clenched his fists at his father’s interruption. Knowing how volatile both her son’s and her husband’s tempers could be Mrs Bond resolved to break the situation  up.

“James, dear, it is late. Why don’t we go to bed?” She brushed her fingers through his hair and coaxed him out of the room, tugging  at his arm like a soft tidal wave.

 

* * *

 

In the early morning he marched alone in between bare trees to the well. If his parents weren’t going to believe him, he’d sneak food out for Q by himself. This James has promised to the ceiling on the previous night.

“Q,” he shouted, “‘T is me, James, from yesterday.”

“I thought you wouldn’t come back anymore!”

“I’m sorry for not coming back yesterday. Ran into some trouble, but I brought supplies  today.” With him he had a bucket containing bread and cold meat wrapped in a blanket. James tied a rope to the handle and let it down into the well.

As he pulled the empty bucket back up he said, “My parents didn’t believe me, sorry.”

“It’s alright, James. Thank you for the food.”

They both fell silent, James shoveling snow into the bucket while Q ate greedily. He let the bucket down again, peering down to where Q’s head snapped up. “Frozen water.”

Q untied the rope with a wide smile and having nothing more to say James gave his goodbyes, resolved he’d come back as soon as possible.

 

* * *

 

“So, how did you end up in the well?”

James leaned against the top row of stones, which seemed to grow colder with every passing December day. Or so he at least thought when he came to see Q for the sole purpose of not being so lonely at home.

“I ran away from an orphanage. When my mother died , I was placed in that horrible facility. Two older children were planning an escape and I snuck out after them. But I got lost in the woods. It was too dark to see and I could run no longer.

“Cold and hungry I was as I tried to look for shelter,” he didn’t admit to being scared, “Found this well then, but I didn’t realise how deep it was, until I climbed in and fell much further than I ought to. Luckily I didn’t injure myself.”

“That is lucky indeed, though you must still be cold down there.”

“Not very and even less now that I have a blanket.”

James wondered if that was true. He hadn’t seen much more than Q’s face and arms, but he looked to be a pale, skinny child inclined to sickness. At least that was what his mother had said of one of their neighbours with a similar complexion. Q however seemed well to him and better spirited with every passing day.

“What about you?” Q’s voice echoed lightly along the walls of the well.

“Me?”

“Who are you and why do you keep coming back?”

“I am James Andrew Bond, heir of the Skyfall estate among a few others and some land. Only child with few friends in this county. Maman says there mustn’t be more children alive here than I am acquainted with. And she doesn’t even know about you.”

“Does no one live near you then, or why would you waste your time here?”

James shrugged, forgetting Q couldn’t see. “I think the closest would be Eve Moneypenny, but it’s scarcely any closer than this well. Besides, we’re not allowed to play very often. She’s a funny girl though and one time she kicked me in the shin, when I told her not to walk on the ice over the lake. It’s dangerous you know.”

Q snorted, “Only imagine I’d fallen in the lake instead of this well. But I could have gotten a good laugh out of frightening that Moneypenny girl when she’d walk the ice. I’m sure she would’ve never kicked you again, unless she’s the sort to do it twicely when angered.”

They both giggled each to themselves. Once he could breathe again, James got up and said, “I’ve enjoyed myself greatly, Q. Thank you for the company. I shall be back for an afternoon when Maman is painting again.”

“Bye!” Q yelled, smile fading away only once he realised that might be days away still.

 

* * *

 

As spring came along the world began to thaw and James found it excessively pleasant to be outdoors. Little streams of water wedged their way through the melting snow towards the lake and the sun warmed his face. In march his mother began to paint outside again and with it he gained an excessive amount of freedom. He promptly dashed off towards the lows already in the early morning.

Breathless, he leaned over the edge of the well. “Q, you won’t believe how warm it is out here! The leaves must come back very soon already.”

“It must be my birthday soon then.”

“How old will you be?”

“Five on the 29th of March.”

“That’s only a fortnight away. My birthday isn’t going to be in months still. I turned seven the day we met,” James explained, “‘Tis why I came at all. See, this is actually a wishing well.”

“Really? Not many coins down here at all. Did your wish at least come true?”

“I dare say yes, but not as I had expected it to.” James sensed Q waited for more detail on the matter, but he didn’t want to confess just how lonely he had been till meeting the boy. In an effort to switch the subject he asked, Pray tell, if you are to turn five, can you read yet?”

Q shook his head. “No, not yet, and how will I ever learn in here?”

“I’ll teach you! Maman taught me a year ago and I have greatly improved. She said so herself.”

Q beamed at the idea of learning something new and James in return beamed at having brightened up his friends day.

 

James returned with his notebook and a copy he’d written of it the next morning. As he let it down, he explained to Q the basics of reading. James then sat down with his back against the well and began to say one letter at a time aloud with an example word. Q followed the matching squiggles he knew to be letters from his own papers. He rolled them quietly off his tongue, until he had ascertained himself of an entire word.

They repeated the practise letter by letter and one word at a time, until Q one day asked, “Does it read ‘Max is an old dog living on the farm?’ there at the top.” His voice quivered on some syllables, while he said others with the certainty of a great reader.

“It does indeed.” James was astonished by how quickly Q had learned to connect sounds and syllables to one another. “You’ve understood these much faster than I did.”

“I get bored, if I don’t do something. This is as good as anything. And if I improve enough I’ll be able to write too. Is that not valuable?”

“‘Tis and must be even more to you than me.”

“Why so?”

“I prefer learning outdoors over reading in the drawing room. My father and I often go riding and the lake by our house is quite suitable for fishing. Sometimes Maman takes me to the woods or to town to teach me the french vocabulary. Though it is heartily embarrassing to stammer a foreign language in the presence of others.”

“Sounds fun to me. And if they do not know it anyway, there’s nothing to be ashamed of, is there? For all they know you could abuse them to be a fat pig,” Q giggled, “Though I suppose your mother might not approve of that.”

“I dare say she would, if I were to say it to the butcher, for he cuts the meat very ill indeed.” James thought of how his mother might smirk and compliment him on the choice of words, when he managed to amuse her. Q rewarded him similarly with his bright laughter.

“But I suppose we should carry on reading. I’ve not got long till Maman will miss me and I do not wish to neglect the horses either, for if I do not go to the stables before dusk I cannot take a turn today.”

“Do go now,“ said Q, “I don’t want to keep you, or abuse you with my slow reading. It is rather like learning a foreign language and I think we both agree that it is best done in private. Go at once now and I can hope when you’ll come back I shall be much improved.”

 

* * *

 

Out of a book Q could not fully comprehend he read: “‘Mrs Carlson wandered over the meadows thinking only of Mr Knight. She knew it was neither acceptable, nor would it bring her any pleasure, but he would not leave her thoughts alone. Even worse, her heart could not help fluttering. If Mr Carlson ever found out, he should lock her up at once. Though, it might spare her a great deal of trouble indeed.’

“I can’t fathom what danger there is in thinking about Mr Knight,” Q wondered, “After all, he is quite funny, unlike Mr Carlson. Surely that can’t be dangerous.”

James chewed on the inside of his cheek. “I suppose that is the very problem here, Mr Carlson not being funny that is. He’s horrible, but they’re married, so she should think better of him than anyone else. At least I have been told I must marry the person I honour and admire most. I certainly know Papa would not not fancy anyone as funny as Maman and I think she does not think anyone else to be more handsome than my father. Love must mean that there is no question of the other person’s character at all, but Mrs Carlson seems to have doubts about her husband compared to Mr Knight.”

“Well, how is one to know, who the best person in the entire world is, till one has met them all? We’d all die of old age, before we’d reach a decision. And what if they do not feel the same? What then? And besides, she has admitted to have married him more for money than his character. An inherent fault in the system, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I never did consider that,” James said, baffled by how frail the concept was, “Perhaps one is not supposed to meet anyone after marrying. Maybe Mr Carlson should have locked his wife up indeed and they should have lived happily with one heart and one mind. But I fancy they’d have gone mad sooner or later anyway.”

“I’ve sat in a well for nearly three years now, with only you for company and I do believe myself quite sane still,” Q mused.

“Yeah, but we’re not married!”

“Of course not! But I really do not see the difference. They’re just people stuck together for all of their lives. It’s hardly any different, though we are not confined to the same house.”

“And if we ever were, we would never get bored, for there would be an entire library full of such insensible tales to try to unravel.”

“Aye, so it is indeed. Shall I read on now?”

“Go ahead, please. It’ll be another hour until sunset still.”

 

* * *

 

James Bond trod through the lows with a light gait. The leaves on all trees were about to erupt from their tiny cocoons, escaping into the air with the joy of brand new life and spring sun. The soft ends of the branches bent as he walked through them, inhaling the scent of spring. On the ground the first flowers had grown. James picked the little flecks of purple amidst the grass from around the well as Q ate some of the food he’d brought with him.

Patterns of light and shadows covered his forearm and birds chirped their spring songs in the surrounding trees. James plucked the last few bluebells from the ground and laid them all in the bucket.

“I picked some flowers for you, since none grow down there,” James explained, before Q had the chance to ask.

Whuffling at the frail flowers, Q said, “You know, I think I remember these from my childhood. Though I rather thought them to be bigger.”

“How much can you still remember of the world out here?”

“Not much.” Q thought about the little fragments of the outsides of the well he still had. He twiddled with a flower stem and then said. “I often dream of being elsewhere. Last night I was out on an empty, blue moor covered in daffodils. In the middle of it a chapel with such colourful windows, though they’re all lost now. It was silent all around, the chapel nearly empty. There was only Mummy in the front row and you preaching about something.”

James watched Q stick the flowers into the cracks in the stone walls. “Me?”

“Yes, you. Do not know what you were trying to say though. But you’d not make a very good clergyman. You looked like you were about to die of boredom.”

“Are all your opinions of others based on your dreams?

“Oh, whether in a dream or not, I simply don’t believe you are destined for the church based on my knowledge of your character.”

James snorted, “Is it a very intricate picture too?”

“As intricate a study as a ten year old can conduct from the bottom of a wishing well.”

They both laughed and fell back into a comfortable silence. For the rest of the afternoon James sat in a gentle breeze and bright beams of sunlight with his back against the well. Q’s voice carried from the well, reading: “Far out in the ocean, where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower, and as clear as crystal, it is very, very deep; so deep, indeed, that no cable could fathom it: many church steeples, piled one upon another, would not reach from the ground beneath to the surface of the water above...”

 

* * *

 

Q sat in the well, dozing off miserably in the early evening. For the third day in a row there was no sign of James Bond. It had poured rain the whole day and the previous night. He’d eaten the last bits of bread that morning and now his stomach rumbled helplessly for more. Q worried. Nothing made any sense. The only time he had run out of food was during a snowstorm the previous winter, but otherwise he could always rely on James. On a bucket of food, a friendly word and a good laugh.

And then it came from above, a bucket, bumping against the wall on the way down. Q emptied it with haste. For a few moments he relished in the sight and then he called upwards, “James! James, what’s happened?”

But there was no answer. Instead he heard the patter of raindrops into the tin bucket, meaning James was still there. Q made out the grey silhouette of him leaning against the well. “James,” he called again in vain. The bucket came again  filled with water this time. Without a word  from James Q was alone again.

 

The damp was chilling. Q held his breath every time he heard the tell tale footsteps before the bucket was lowered. Thirteen times altogether James had simply dropped off food and a book or two without a word. Sometimes Q had called up, but by now he’d fallen silent. Q sniffled and ate, trying not to think about any of it.

 

“It’s now been a month and a half,” James said four days later, “and you must wonder why I haven’t spoken to you, but I didn’t know how. I’m not sure I do even now.”

“Try.” The word slipped from his lips and Q could hardly breathe for fear of their effect.

“Six weeks ago our groundskeeper and one of my father’s closest friends, Mr Kincaid, informed me that my parents, who had gone on a rock climbing trip in the Swiss Alps, fell to their deaths-” James pressed his eyes shut and balled his hands into fists. He still couldn’t think about it without a surge of overwhelming devastation, without feeling as if he would suffocate from sadness and drop dead from a broken heart any minute now. It never came. Instead he was left alone in the rain with tears stinging at his eyes.

“James-”

“Don’t say you’re sorry,” he clenched his jaw, “Just don’t. It doesn’t bloody well help.”

James crouched down, head in his hands. He let out a few wretched sobs that drowned in the sound of November rain and forced air to flow in and out of his body at a slow and safe pace. The world around him swam behind the tears he tried to blink away. They stuck to his lashes and fell to the ground, burning as they went..

Q listened to the faint sounds for as long as they lasted, thinking feverishly of something - anything - to say. His mind came to nothing, the rain pounded on the roof of the well. His breaths rasped dry and desperate. “What will happen to you?” he asked, trying not to think of how it might seal his fate too.

“I don’t know.” James’ voice was collected to a point of clinical coolness even though he couldn’t stop crying as he spoke, “I’m staying at home still with Kincaid, though only God knows how long that will last. It all depends on Lady M. I have tried to convince everyone I am determined to stay at Skyfall, that my heart might break, if I had to leave, but in reality I want to run as far away from it as I can now.

“Everything reminds me of them. I can’t even walk across the yard without thinking of Maman painting in it. But what is there to do? I will be miserable anywhere, perhaps some more here than elsewhere, but if I left, you’d die-”

“James, please,” Q cried, “You cannot make yourself this unhappy for my sake-”

“Oh, but why not? There is no justice or fairness to life, Q. I’ll die slowly on the inside regardless of where I am, why not here, where I at least have a purpose.” James was silent for a long while, before he said, “You’re the only thing left in my life.”

Both of them leaned against the same wall, crying silently in the rain. Life was irreversibly changed forever. All they could do now was mourn and mend or go under together. Q was terrified at the prospect.

 

* * *

 

Q knew all along it would take time. It hit him on a morning like any other that even time couldn’t heal everything. James still came ‘round as he had always before, but it was not of similar nature. He carried food and books with him, explained some of the things he’d learned that day before heading over, but his voice lacked something. Q noticed there were less and less jokes. Most often James sat there with his back against the wall for an hour or two, sometimes muttering vaguely to Q, sometimes not, and then he would get up and leave. Go home to a house with a servant and a governor and no one to talk to.

When Q asked him about it on a bright summer day, sweltering heat creeping even through the lows, James merely said, “It’s growing up.”

But Q knew better. It was not that delicate and gradual shifting he’d observed in the older kids in the orphanage. It was the deep unbreakable silence of intense emotional pain. The same kind Q felt on some icy winter nights, waking in a fit of claustrophobia and wanting out. He’d remain stuck in the well just as James remained stuck in his thoughts and Q could only hope there was a way out of it. That someday he might not be surprised to hear James laugh, that he might know what what the sky actually looked like beyond the tiny ring he saw. As long as James kept coming back, Q had a flicker of undying hope that he would hold onto for dear life.

 

* * *

 

James walked alongside the lake. His life kept tragically spinning off course in slow elliptical patterns and he found himself once again at the end of long and deliberate contemplation. In front of him Eve Moneypenny’s figure grew larger and larger, till she was but a few yards away. Moneypenny!” he called.

She turned and waved with a wide smile breaking out over her face. “Bond, what brings you here today? Don’t normally fancy the woods over the lakeside?” She always said everything with a smirk, an offer for more than she was giving even though Eve Moneypenny was hell bent on independence and to him that equalled a certain amount of detachment. Right now he was about to ask her for the opposite.

“Eve, I’ve come to say goodbye,” James said, sniffling in the wind, “I should have maybe told you earlier, but I’ve got to go to London to continue my studies. Lady M insists.”

“Lucky you! Wish I got to go too. Instead I’ll be stuck here with no one in miles to talk to. How long will you be gone, surely not for ever?”

He shook his head, “Some years.”

Eve cast her eyes back to the water. “I’ll miss your dumb jokes. You will write, won’t you? Even though it isn’t proper, of course.”

“I will,” James smiled,”Wouldn’t dare to deprive one of my few friends of the joys of city life. But, Eve, I must ask you for a favour in my absence.”

“Oh?”

James took a large breath and began to rely the entire affair with Q, paying great attention to some details and none at all to others in the story of their eight year long acquaintance.

 

* * *

 

James walked down to the lows for what he knew would be the last time in several years. A surreal pang seemed to crush his ribcage right against his heart as he reached the well. “Q,” he said in an uncharacteristically cheery voice.

“One moment, passage,” the boy mumbled as he did, when caught in the middle of an interesting book.

A smile ghosted over James’ face as he watched the mop of dark curls fall back after a short while and Q grinning up at him. “Why are you in such a good mood?”

“Aren’t I allowed to be?” he asked, thinking how much melancholy actually welled within him. James however was determined to make their last encounter a pleasant one, for he might never get to see Q smile at him again.

“Of course you are. I’ll hardly climb out and arrest you, now will I?”

“You do have a knack for surprising me. It seems that if you wish to do so, no amount of time or patience is too much to ask for,” said James, “In conclusion, I would not put it past you.”

Q chuckled and they continued to jab and joke for a while, until James could no longer keep up without sadness slipping into his eyes.

“Well, I think it is time for me to go now,” he said, “Mr Tanner must be waiting for me to come back for our last afternoon lesson.”

“Goodbye! Till we meet again,” Q chanted in a dramatic voice that broke into a laugh.

“Until we meet again, indeed,” James mumbled, thinking of how long away that would be. And Q knew nothing, because he’d taken the cowardly way out of it, convincing himself it would make it easier on both of them. Deep down James knew this was a betrayal of their friendship, Q’s unquestionable trust. He wiped a few tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand. He’d come back one day and then it would be entirely up to Q to decide the faith of their friendship. For now there was nothing James could do, but blink away the tears from his red rimmed eyes and hope for forgiveness.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A big thank you to rerumfragmenta for making these fantastic chapter headers for the story.

_**Chapter Two** _

_**No Lullabies For The Lonely** _

 

* * *

 

 

Mr James Bond arrived in London by train from Glasgow in the height of summer. His first impression of the city was not a good one, with the smell of sweat and its lack of space in comparison to Scotland, but the mansion of Lord Mallory let him escape all inconveniences, excepting the heat. He thought of how much nicer it was back home and how refreshingly cool it must be at the bottom of the well Q still sat in, but quickly forced himself out of it before he’d be infected with sentiment and homesickness. As much as he would miss his friend, this was only his first day in London of many more to come.

 

* * *

 

Eve Moneypenny had found herself on lone walks in the woods more times than she cared to count. More often than not she had gone further than she ought to, but almost never to this side of the lake, let alone to the lows. A fairytale forest of ancient hardwood humming in the wind.

“Hello?” she called as she reached the old wishing well.

“Hello?”

The boy in the well sounded equally unsure of her existence as she was of his. “I have come to bring you food at the request of Mister Bond. He also sends a letter.” As she lowered a bucket into the well Eve saw Q rising from the shadows, pale and dirty, distrustful look laced with worry.

He emptied the bucket from its contents, merely concerned for the letter. “Why has he not come himself?” Q asked. This was the first time in their eight years of acquaintance that James Bond hadn’t come personally. In fact, Q had been convinced he was the only one aware that Q was stuck down there.

“Perhaps the letter will give you some insight, but you mustn’t worry. He is not injured or anything of the sorts.”

Then I see no reason for his not coming, thought Q. “Thank you Miss…”

“Moneypenny, Eve Moneypenny. We will meet again, sir,” she said, now leaning over the edge of the well. With those words she left him alone to his letter.

  


_July 23rd 1854, Skyfall_

_My dear friend,_

_It grieves me to inform you that I will not be coming back to your well for some time, for I have had to go to London. As you already know, I have continued to live in my home with the aid of my father’s fortune in the guardianship of Lady M with Mister Tanner as my governor. However it has now become impossible to continue my studies at home, which is why I will stay with a friend of Lady M in town. I wish I would have told you the other day, when I last came around, but I was afraid you may have asked me to stay and then I could not have gone without being in even greater misery. Therefore I must now apologize for this cowardly and wretched way of letting you know of my departure. I do hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me one day._

_However, it remains a fact that you are still in the well and I could by no means neglect proper provision and company for you. This is why I confessed to Eve Moneypenny that the friend I have mentioned in her presence on some occasions goes by the name Q and explained to her your situation. I have furthermore persuaded her to provide you with food, drink and company. I do hope you accept the last mentioned. She is a young lady with plenty of wit and humour to share and mischief to keep any man on his toes for a lifetime. If you decide against it, she is instructed to carry out as many books as our library yields._

_I will apologize once more for this hasty and improper departure and perhaps it needs to be excused for many more letters. I hope to be back soon at Skyfall and in your company again. It shall remain my sincerest and most treasured wish._

_With best regards,_

_James Bond_

 

Q held the sheet of paper in disbelief. His only friend had left him without a word in advance, without a regard to his feeling on the matter. The tears that welled up in his eyes blurred the words on the page and he could not help feeling that his world was crumbling.

 

* * *

 

Two days later Q stirred from an apathetic trance, thoughts torn away from the letter. He’d read it too many times to properly follow the words as they appeared on the page anymore. They were burned into the back of his memory. From above he heard footsteps that ended by the well and Miss Moneypenny glanced over the top.

“When did he tell _you_?” Q yelled up.

“Excuse me?”

“When did James Bond tell you he was going to London?”

“Oh,” Eve didn’t look at him, when she said, “I learned of his impending departure ten days ago, a week before he left.” She hesitated, “But I do believe he’s known of it for longer. Something has been on his mind for some time.”

“So he lied to me most deliberately then,” Q muttered to himself. Eve he asked, “Do you know how long he will be gone?”

“I’m afraid he did not know himself, but I do know he was reluctant to go. If it is any consolation, you and I are now both friendless.”

Q looked up. Eve was a pretty, young woman with a sly smile, as James had put it, and Q thought it impossible for her to have trouble making friends. From what he had heard she was a pleasant, if teasing, young woman, who feared no one regardless of age and sex. “I bet you have better luck at gaining new ones than I do. In case you haven’t noticed, I am stuck at the bottom of a wishing well.”

She laughed heartily and Q could not help smiling. If Eve truly was all the things James thought her to be, Q could give her a chance. His only other option was a devastating kind of loneliness that he didn’t even dare to think about.

Luckily Eve Moneypenny was determined to save them both from such a fate.“Do tell, Q, how long have you been in this well? Surely not all winter I hope?”

“I believe it is to be eight years this November.”’

“Eight! Good heavens, how have you managed? I should die, if not from the lack of sunlight, then from a broken heart at the loss of any kind of society.”

“Perhaps I should have done so to, but James found me then and he has since provided me with food, water, company and, when not his personally, then that of a good book.”

“His heart has always been an amiable one.”

“I’m afraid, Miss Moneypenny,” said Q, “the heart’s only purpose is to continuously pump blood. If science is to be believed.”

He smirked, thinking he’d taught a naive woman a lesson, but she smirked right back, with a glint in her eyes saying ‘Careful, boy. I know how to bring a man to his knees’. “And I am afraid science has not yet managed to explain _all_ bodily functions and their purposes.”

When she left a quarter of an hour later Q did not return to the letter until he had made up his mind on what he’d observed of her today. James Bond had left him with a conundrum of the most lively kind.

 

* * *

 

Q spent his entire summer talking to Eve, who liked to sit sideways on the edge of the well, parasol in one hand, the other motioning wildly as she explained the happenings of a nearby town. She would often spend hours with him and Q wondered, if Eve was as alone as she claimed to be.

Over the course of a few months Q made some observations on her character. Eve Moneypenny, though never frivolous in her actions, liked to give him a specific account of what went on in a world he hardly knew at all. This she did with a glint in her eye, which told Q to pay close attention, for her stories sounded casual, but the details always opened up a door to understanding the inherent characteristics of human behaviour. It was like shifting one’s focus within a painting to discover the background was much more intricate than the intended focal point. Q took it as a challenge to map  out the described sliver of society in his mind. So, Eve Moneypenny and the boy in the well did not notice summer passing by until it was already gone.

 

* * *

 

Q knew by the crunch of her footsteps, he knew by the peculiar scent of everything dying, rotting away and he knew by the yellow leaves that fluttered down to him to announce autumn. Eve complained to him about the cold north winds as she came by one morning.

“I’ve brought a blanket and a letter from James today,” she added, holding the prized possessions out, “He wrote me that he is quite well settled in London and spends the chief of his days studying, though I am certain he’ll write you about something far more interesting, or at least with more honesty.”

She didn’t say much more to him that day and excused herself without bothering to make up lies about the reason of her departure. Eve was, when it mattered most, a straightforward girl and Q valued that, even if, in that moment, he valued nothing more than the letter in his hands.  

 

_October 17th 1854, London_

_Dear Q,_

_I hope you will read my letters. For fear of you rejecting them entirely I have not dared to write before now. In the meantime I have tried to settle here, although the city is rather unpleasant to my tastes. I can only now say that I have gotten used to it. London has plenty of entertainment and people, but I have yet to find a well with decent company in it. In fact I have not managed to find as good a friend as you in the regular population I have encountered either. Perhaps this information is irrelevant, perhaps it is not; I long to know. Wish you would write._

_James Bond_

These were the only seven sentences James had addressed him with in nearly three months. He did not know, if it was possible to feel anything else than resentment. Despite his anger, Q could not rip the letter apart. Instead he resolved not to write James Bond a single letter in his lifetime.

 

* * *

 

“Yoohoo,” Eve chimed, breath puffing up in the freezing winter air. She found Q like she had found him on most days lately: pacing around in circles, reading. “Don’t you ever get dizzy doing that?”

“It helps me keep warm.”

“Suit yourself, but speaking of that,” she said triumphantly and Q knew it was his cue to stop reading and look up, “I found an old cape in the attic. It might be better for the purpose of pacing than wrapping yourself in a felt.”

Q thanked her for it and put his book away. When he lifted the cape from the bucket, two wrapped parcels fell out of it. “Eve, what are these?”

“Well, it _is_ almost Christmas.”

He turned them over, the colour of the paper faded on one parcel only; worn off in the post, he realised. “No letter this time?” he asked.

Eve shook her head.

 

* * *

 

Alone in his well on Christmas morning, Q could no longer fend off the loneliness. He read and reread James' inscription on his Christmas present. 'Picked it with you in mind. Perhaps getting away from the Scottish winter onto a tropical island might cheer you up,' it said.

Meaningless. Robinson Crusoe's adventures didn't comfort him. Crusoe, alone on the island, was too similar to his own miserable existence in the well. Frustrated, Q picked up the pen and paper Eve had brought him months ago with that first letter and drew up a message.

 

_December 25th 1854, The Well_

_James,_

_it is Christmas morning and I hate you more today than I have on any day since your departure. I hope you enjoy London and it was worth leaving me for; I truly do. For, if it was not, it must mean we are both unhappy for no reason._

_Merry Christmas and a happy New Year,_

_Q_

Remembering his promise to himself, Q folded his letter and decided never to send it. He picked up Robinson Crusoe and began to pace.

  


* * *

 

_April 20th 1855, The Well_

_James,_

_Spring has come at last even to the bottom of this well and with it a new letter from you. Thank you for writing them even though I cannot reply. Sometimes I wonder, for how much longer you will have the patience to keep it up and what I shall do, if you stop. For I have nothing down here, no light, no joy, nothing but longing. Am eternally grateful to have Eve, though I can’t say it aloud._

_What is this kind of a life anyway? How have I made it this far in the first place? There are questions like these that plague me and you a part of all of the answers. Isn’t it spiteful?_

_Q_

* * *

 

_October 9th 1855, London_

_Dear Q,_

_It has been nearly a year. I do not know what you have done to my letters, but Eve tells me you take them all. I wish you would write me even a single word. Is this punishment?_

_London has become so tiresome already. I wish I could say I enjoy myself here, that it was worth coming to, but it is not so. Although Lord Mallory is a most excellent host and I can complain neither about my accommodation nor my freedom, this place vexes me greatly. I must not be built for city life. Until I can return, there is nothing to do but adjust._

_James Bond_

 

* * *

 

_December 29th 1855, The Well_

_James Sodding Bond,_

_I have now read every last book in your library. Eve deserves a medal for dragging them here and back again. She deserves a medal for being here with me. She deserves everything the world has to offer. And you deserve to go to hell, though I’d never wish for that. Might even come true and then you will most certainly never come back. Why I still dare hope for your return, I know not._

_Send books, you twat!_

_Q_

This time he tore the paper to shreds.

 

* * *

 

On foggy mornings beams of sunlight would get caught in the fog and Q saw what light was. He watched the fainter and more intense planes of yellow, always straight and sharp in the white smoke. How one remained stationary while the other would not stop moving was a mystery to him. Q fancied it was rather like Eve Moneypenny wandering the world and him trapped right there. Albeit, she was sharp strokes of clarity and he obfuscated swirls. He thought of this all morning long, till he heard her stepping through the woods.

“Good morning, Miss Moneypenny,” he called up.

“‘Tis almost noon.”

“Details, details.”

“Make life worth living, Q. How are you today? Do you know it is springtime and I do in fact have a little something for you?”

His first thought was a message from James, as it always was. Though he did not say it out loud, because half the time she meant a fresh scone or a new book, smelling of dark ink, and yet half the time she did mean a letter from James indeed. “Well, will you or will you not put me out of my misery?”

“Oh, everything happens in time. It is a letter for you and two books as well. Did not receive a letter myself, though I shall be damned, if I let it spoil my day.”

“He did not send you, my faithful caretaker, an exhaustive account of all his doings of the past few months?” Q asked in a mock concerned voice, “My, he is truly the worst scum of all scum to ever have trod the streets of this empire.”

One of the things Q liked about Eve was the way she burst out into unabashed laughter, like her joy could not be contained by anything in the world. When she laughed he thought he didn’t mind not seeing the sun.

“But all jokes aside,” Q pretended to aim at seriousness and Eve pretended she wasn’t on the verge of hyperventilating, “I do have scientific evidence that James Bond is a lazy git.”

“Is that so? May I see your research data?”

Q smiled a crooked smile, trying not to burst out laughing himself. He had Eve and Eve had him and they would survive the ever lingering absence of James Bond.

 

* * *

 

_April 5th 1856, London_

_Dear Q,_

_Winter is once again gone and every tree blossoms with a thousand flowers covering their twisted branches. It is rather exciting to have such a sea of vivid colours, though I must say the muted delicacy of Scottish nature is enchanting in a whole other way. Remembered you telling me of that daffodil dream of yours many years ago. Wondered if you still remember what these flowers look like. Should’ve sent you a bucketful of those instead of bluebells._

_On that note, the other week I met a scientist, gathering flowers in our park. He reminded me greatly of you, or perhaps it is you who reminds me of him. He must be at least seventy and goes by the name of Major Geoffrey Boothroyd. The flowers he gathers for his wife. Met her too the other day at their house. She complimented me on my fine manners and even gave me two books her husband has written. One deals with mechanics, the other with kinematics. Physics in short, as I was informed. Decided to send them to you, since I can’t make them out very well. Am more of a linguist, as you know._

_With best regards,_

_James Bond_

Q looked at the two books in front of him: plain grey and inscribed only with roman numerals. He would make it his duty to understand their contents, however long it would take. And when - if - James Bond might ever return, he would tell him it was child’s play.

 

* * *

 

He lay on his back in the well, legs against the cool stone wall, and stared up. Q thought he might not believe proper, vibrant colours existed, if he did not still dream in them every night. Summer was on the rise and the warmth had at last started to creep down to him. But he was not reached by real sunlight. Hours and hours passed by as he stared into the black circle of a roof at the top, surrounded by a ring of light, sky blue and interrupted only by green leaves. The rest of his world consisted of earthy browns and cool greys, contrasted only by the darkness of night and a single lantern shining yellow light onto the precious pages of his books. He wondered what it must be like out there. The few recollections he had from his early childhood had been blurred by time.

“Time is a mistress impossible to please,” he said to the birds singing their songs in the trees. His voice echoed off the walls, simultaneously scattered and strengthened. “Regard her not at all and the loss will slowly charr you, until the day you die. Worship her for all she is and she will still steal everything you have.” He laughed to himself, wondering what had inspired him to such a silly monologue.The birds continued to sing their melodies and lullabies and Q thought he’d not been as happy all year as he was then.

 

* * *

 

_July 16th 1856, Balcombe_

_Dear Q,_

_I have come to spend the summer in Balcombe. Lady M is to come down this year and I look forward to meeting her again. Major Boothroyd is to join the Mallorys to make some adjustments to Lord Mallory’s guns for the hunting season. It is one of the things I miss about home, although my heart seldomly aches without a reminder anymore. Perhaps I will be able to join the party next year, for I am to remain here at least till the end of the coming year._

_James Bond_

* * *

 

_September 8th 1856, The Well_

_James,_

_I have come to the conclusion that I do not hate you anymore. I wonder if I ever did. It has been twenty-three months now, since you left, and there has not been a day on which I haven’t had to question my worth or that of our friendship. I know it was never your intention to break me into a thousand little pieces, but it happened regardless. I have no doubt this information would bring you great relief and joy. Unfortunately I have vowed not to send a single letter to you and that promise mustn’t be broken._

_Q_

* * *

 

Eve came by to drop off a bucket of food and one with water for Q every few days. She made a point of telling him inane stories, which later somehow always wove together to form a picture of the world. He grinned to himself on a cool September morning, when he realized she’d done it again.

“Eve,” he said, “thank you.”

“For what?”

“You’ve given me sight where I can’t see, let me hear conversations I could by no means have listened to. You have introduced me to every person within a ten mile radius of this well without my leaving it. You have given me the world beyond my reach, soothed my loneliness better than I could have ever dreamt of and I thank you for that.”

She sat down on the edge of the well. “But Q, I have done no more for you than you have done for me. Who else could I speak to? Who else would keep a secret or dare to disagree with me? No one has a cheek like you and I too have been alone for nearly two years now, so I would say we are even in this matter.”

“Does that rob me of my right to express my gratitude?”

“By no means, but praise wisely. Plenty of people have a far more accurate depiction of the world than I do.”

“Not to me, Miss Moneypenny.”

 

* * *

 

_December 21st 1856, London_

_Dear Q,_

_Today I paid a visit to the National Portrait Gallery, which was established just this month. What a pleasurable way it was to spend an afternoon, for there were so many skillfully painted pictures to look at. I was drawn especially to a Scottish painter, who has managed to capture the forlorn nature down to its most delicate details. To me those few canvases were frozen points in time, like a gateway to my past. As much as I hate to say so, my memories of Scotland are no longer refined, the sharp edges have been softened by time and I cannot picture Skyfall without the lines and colours mashing together. And yet the feeling of home is something I continue to recall. I wish I could recall the sound of your voice too, but it too has become distant and untouchable. Why won’t you write me?_

_With apologies for ridiculous sentimentality,_

_James Bond_

 

* * *

 

Q watched his breath puff up in smoky clouds. He knew winter was about to break; he could hear the snow melting from the trees, drop down in little wet plop plop noises. Regardless of that it would take weeks until the temperature would rise to something more pleasant.Even then sunlight would never truly reach him. He longed to get out, even for a single day. His hope had trickled out of him like spring water leaking from the cracks of a mountainside and he fancied there was not a written line of words in the world powerful enough to restore it.

 

* * *

 

_March 12th 1857, London_

_Dear Q,_

_London is dreadfully wet at this time of the year. It simply won’t stop raining and the streets are covered a film of water at least two inches deep. It is like stepping out to a riverside, when we leave the house, for the rush of water can be heard everywhere. Yesterday the sun shone and everything glimmered in the light as if it was on the verge of catching fire. There is a stream not far from your well where the water happily glides over rocks and pebbles, splashing as it goes. Perhaps you can hear it on quiet nights._

_James Bond_

 

Q tried to.

 

* * *

 

Eve Moneypenny strolled up to his well on a hot summer day with a smile as bright as the tree leaves caught in mid day sunlight. Q liked to think it was the liveliest sight he’d ever seen.

“James has sent me the most extraordinary letter today and I shall read it to you, regardless of the trust I may break, for he only sent this one and I do believe you of all people deserve these lines.”

She pulled the letter from her pocket, unfolded it and began to read the lines out loud, “‘Miss Moneypenny, I have yet again gone to Balcombe for the summer, however I have gone alone this year, accepting the invite of a certain Mr Lynd, whom Lord Mallory introduced me to the  autumn before last. He is a French landowner, who, I believe, has invited me hither for the sake of introducing his daughter to me. See, I have met him and his wife on a few occasions last summer and he vowed to come back here. It is no secret to him that my father has left me a fortune and I am certain Mr Lynd lives in the hopes of me marrying his daughter.

Upon meeting the lady in question last Tuesday I can now tell you that I have no such intentions towards her, nor do I believe that it would be her wish either. Despite being conceited, Ms Lynd has fallen in love with a young Algerian merchant. He, unfortunately, has barely any money. I inform you of all these circumstances because we have decided to play the part of a young couple for the sake of peace, so if there are any rumors of it, they must be false.’”

Q interrupted her, “Why do you deem it necessary for me to know all this? I would not hear such rumours from anyone, but you, or the man himself. And James Bond is free to marry whomever he pleases.”

“Patience, Q. I was not done yet. There are some irrelevant points made in between, but then he gets to the day he wrote the letter on, so listen. ‘We part by the bridge every morning as she goes off to see her lover and I venture into the woods. Today I chose to explore the other side of the river towards the west and I stumbled across the most enchanting spot. Hidden in the midst of the unkempt trees lay an opening drenched in bright light and believe it or not, in the middle stood a well! ‘T was old and free of water, overgrown with moss. I could not help but think of our wishing well in the lows and Q in it. For some time I believed I must be dreaming, but I spent hours there. You know how I have suffered from the separation of my two truest friends all this time I’ve spent in London and this afternoon that overwhelming burst of melancholy from the earliest of my days away found me again.

‘I am now resolved on returning as soon as my studies will allow it, which mightn’t be till autumn next year, but any light at the horizon is hope enough for me.’”

Eve grinned at him in triumph. Q thought it too good to be true. “Do you really think he’ll come back? There cannot be anything of importance here for him.”

“Oh, but he must!” Eve exclaimed, “His fortune isn’t released, unless he comes himself to get it and I would bet all my money on his _wanting_ to come back. I know you don’t see much light down there, Q, but you must still believe the night breaks every morning.”

“And what if I have lost all hope?”

“Then you shall have some of mine, for I have plenty to give today.”

 

* * *

 

It wasn’t that far up. The thought had crossed Q’s mind daily all summer long. He couldn’t sit on the ground with his legs stretched out anymore. He hadn’t been able to lie straight in years, but what he hadn’t thought off in all that time was the distance between him and the real world in all its glory. He was no longer five years old.

The thought would not leave him alone. It haunted him at every cold, dark hour he spent awake, a reminder that autumn would be here within the month and Q would have to spend another winter in this hell hole. Alone. Because no matter how much he liked Eve, he would always be alone for as long as he was stuck in the well. Maybe, he thought, it’s my time to taste the freedom I have so tirelessly dared to hope for.

 

* * *

 

_September 4th 1857, Moneypenny Lodge_

_James,_

_You must come home at once! Q has attempted to climb out of the well by the rope of the bucket last night and has fallen several yards. He has been in low spirits lately, but I did not realise how truly desperate he was. And who is to blame for this but me?_

_I fear he is injured, but he won’t let me get help. He even yelled at me - downright screamed like an animal  -  not to tell anyone. It was the first time in four years I have seen him so upset. Then he burst into tears and I became utterly despaired. Please, James, the situation is dire and I don’t know not what to do with poor Q._

_Eve Moneypenny_

* * *

 

James Bond watched his childhood’s landscape unfold around him, soothed by the familiar roads and anxious of what awaited him at home. His carriage creaked as it stopped in front of Skyfall. The house stood unscathed and just as cold as he had remembered it. He deposited his luggage in the foyer, taking in the scent of his old home. He would have lingered, but he hadn’t come back just for the sake of it. Worried about Q he set off toward the Moneypenny lodge.

The sun was setting over the hill on the opposite side of the lake, dyeing the world around him orange and grey. He spotted Eve by the lake side and called out, “Miss Moneypenny!”

“James!” she yelled, running towards him. He didn’t get a word out before she had her arms slung around him.

“I cannot believe my eyes!” She stepped back to look at him. “Why did you not write that you were coming?”

“The letter would have reached you only tomorrow, for I set off an hour after receiving yours. I barely had the time to pack and most of my things are to arrive only in a few days time from now. You must know I could not sleep, until I could assure myself of Q’s safety.”

Her smile faded, “Have you not been with him yet?”

“No, I came straight h-”

“James, you must go at once,” she urged, “I begged Kincaid to get hold of a rope ladder and deliver it to Skyfall, for we must get him out as soon as possible. Please, James, go there right away. I am afraid of what Q may do to himself, of what he’s already done I’ve only been able to pray that he hasn’t broken anything vital.”

James grew increasingly anxious at her words. “If that is the case, we must go immediately.”

He turned to head for the hill, but Eve grabbed him by the arm.“I can’t come. It is almost dark; there is no way father will let me.”

“But Q may not want to see me. I do not wish to inflict him anymore pain.”

“Oh, James, you’ll only do more harm, if you wait. Go, go now.”

He said his goodbyes, embraced Eve once more and began a climb over the hill towards the lows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The National Portrait Gallery was opened in December 1856 and has since moved (in 1896) to adjoin the current National Gallery that's so familiar to this fandom.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again a big thank you to rerumfragmenta, who has been bloody amazing during our entire collaboration. I couldn't have hoped for anything more and this was a great first experience taking part in a fandom challenge. Also a thanks to the lovely people, who make the effort to organize these challenges, since they involve some major logistics. We all appreciate it a lot!
> 
> As a warning there are some silly bits in here that can hopefully be forgiven, but not without a bit of angst of course.

_**Chapter Three** _

_**Only Angels Among The Broken Hearted** _

 

* * *

 

 

James Bond ran down the hill, heart racing in anticipation, lungs begging for precious air. He had to slow his gait in the umbrage, steps now unsure on the grounds he used to walk daily for more than seven years. But there the well stood, as desolate as ever. Like him been before he’d tossed that coin in it twelve years ago.

“Q!” James yelled.

“James?” Q muttered. He lit his lantern, squinted in the light and gazed up, not understanding why his chest hurt so much. James’ familiar face appeared at the top and Q was convinced he was dreaming. But it took only one touch of the cold stone walls in the well to remind him about everything.

“James Bond, you bloody bastard, get me out of this sodding well!” he screamed.

James panted, torn between despair and bursting out in laughter. “Glad to see you too.”

“James, please,” Q swallowed, “I’ll die down here, if I don’t get out.”

“I’ll get you out, promise. Let me run back to the house and I’ll find something to get you out tonight still, yeah?”

Q nodded, despite feeling ill even at the thought of being left alone for another minute. His head spun with the notion that James Bond had actually come back, come back for him too. He sat in the flicker of his lantern as the night settled over the earth like a smooth blanket and James ran over a hilltop.

 

James felt like he was running away from darkness and perhaps he was. He jogged towards Skyfall, the day dying away as he wondered where he might find candles and matches in the house he’d left deserted for three years. When he burst in through the door the shadow painted rooms felt as familiar as they always had. His  fingers could still trace their way along the walls as if he was nine years old again. James lit himself a lantern and paced about, gathering a coat and a pair of shoes before he spotted a rope ladder in the sitting room. He grabbed it and hurried back into the night with his hope as bright as the stars in the sky. He remembered the lines about hope and light on the horizon he’d written to Eve some months ago and muttered, “I need no light from the sun, the moon or the stars as long as Q has a lantern, I shall find my way in this world.”

 

Q listened for footsteps like he’d never listened for anything in his entire life; waited for James Bond to return with a ladder, rope, anything that would let him escape his prison once and for all. Thudding footsteps rewarded him within the hour.

“Q,” James said and in the silent night his voice echoed off the walls as soothing as an owl’s melodic hoots, “I’ll let down a rope ladder. Get to the other side of the well.”

Q pushed himself up against the wall, sweaty back in touch with frigid stone. The wooden bars of the ladder fell from above, clattering against the wall. It was like a line drawn between points in the universe. Two rusty oil  lanterns at this point in time. James climbed down before Q could even think of touching the ladder.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Q whispered back. His world with it’s limitations had transcended all its boundaries in one night and Q couldn’t trust that it wasn’t just his a wishful dream. He reached out tentatively and set his hand against James’ chest. The human warmth in the midst of his cold well could by no means be an illusion. “So, you really are back then.”

James nodded. “I heard you tried to climb out of here. Unsuccessfully. Are you injured?”

“I have some bruises, but no broken bones. I think.”

James hummed and they both fell silent, staring at each other and then the walls in the shimmer of their lanterns. A smile crept onto Q’s face and grew as steadily as a sunrise.

“What?”

“I’d forgotten what you looked like, though I’m not sure I ever properly knew.”

“That makes two of us then,” James confessed, “Sometimes I dreamt of a well and I knew it was you in it, although it was merely a black figure. ”

“You dreamt of me?”

James set his lantern down next to Q’s. “How could I not?”

“Well, you had the entire world at your hands, but I only ever had you.”

“Do you want to see it then, the big wide world? It isn’t all that special.”

“I’d like that.” Q pushed himself off the wall and looked up into the darkness he was about to enter.

James offered him a pair of shoes and packed the few things he had down there into a bucket. “Go. I’ll take these.”

Q swallowed, hands on the bars of the rope ladder. He took one last breath of heavy air and then he was off the ground. It was a bizarre sensation, as terrifying as it was freeing. Moving one foot after another he climbed higher and higher - without falling this time - until he’d reached the edge. He slung his arms over it, cast a look back down, where James stood. Q pulled his left leg out and then his right, both firmly planted on grassy ground.

Slowly he turned his head towards the sky, following the thousands of stars which painted the sky all the way to the moon he hadn’t seen in years.

“Do you like it?” James asked.

Q walked towards the closest tree, leaves crunching beneath his feet, and touched the crust. He ran his fingers over the rough cracks in the trunk; glanced at the leaves in the moonlight. This is a real tree, he thought.

“Q?”

“I cannot believe I am out here. This,” he turned towards James, pointing at the tree, “is a real tree with a real trunk and not just leaves filtering sunlight.”

“It is indeed and there’s plenty more of them around here. In fact you’ll see hundreds upon hundreds of them from the hilltop.”

James handed him a lantern and a coat, taking Q by the hand and pulled him towards the hill. Q stumbled on branches, feet wobbling in the ever changing terrain.

“Eve never told me about all this,” he said as they walked through the forest. But he could not even imagine what he saw before him when they reached the hilltop. Stars covered the sky in a dense burst of chaos, a blanket of cold light and nothingness, cut off only by the black lines of the horizon. He spun around in circles, spiky trees rising in large colonies, open grounds bathing in moonlight. Down towards the other side from the lows lay a still lake, which mirrored the sky above it, like an opening into another world. Q could scarcely breathe.

 

* * *

 

He woke in a bed for the first time in more than a decade; sighed and let his eyes wander over the panels of the roof and the wallpaper, allured by the faint shadows cast into corners and along the seams. Outside the sun was rising as it had for as long as the earth existed, but Q did not remember the complex ritual the sky went through to get the bright star up into the sky. He hugged his legs to his chest, toes curled into his palms, and watched the deep blue fade out into pastel colours and light blue hues. Q thought the novelty of it might never fade away.

In the yard he spotted James talking to an old man with an enormous beard and two dogs, none of whom paid any attention to the spectacle transpiring around them. He supposed there had to be more interesting things in the world, even if he knew none.

 

If there was one thing James Bond had learned during his absence, it was to pay attention to his surroundings. London was full of life, thieves and danger. Due to that he noticed the flick of a curtain from the corner of his eye.

“Would you mind dropping this off at Moneypenny Lodge for me?” he asked Kincaid, handing him a note.

“I might as well swing by. Eager to get back to your fireplace, aye?” Kincaid teased, “‘Tis not as warm here as in London.”

“I can still stand the winters just as well, Kincaid.” He clapped the old man on the shoulder and headed back, glancing at Q’s window and found himself at the end of an open stare. James Bond realized he’d missed Q’s unapologetic honesty. It was refreshing among the averted gazes and coy eye batting he’d endured for three years.

He ran up the staircase two steps at a time and knocked on the door. “Q?”

“Yes?”

“Can I come in?”

“Uh-, of course.”

James cracked the door open to see Q sit confused in the bed.

“Um, I’m sorry, I don’t know any of the standard replies,” Q muttered, tugging his blanket further up in fear of violating some etiquette. “Is this,” he gestured between himself and James, “even within the boundaries of propriety?”

“Q,” James said, stepping closer, “if I gave a damn about ‘propriety’ I wouldn’t have come back to the well after the first night. I would have never asked Eve to take care of you, but I’ve always been more concerned about your comfort than outdated tradition.”

“Other people wouldn’t see it that way and neither will you, in time.”

“I meant what I said, Q. If you are adamant on your point, Eve shall explain the social norms to you, for even I don’t understand some myself. But for now, can we try to get through this one day? No rules, no consequences.”

Q nodded, letting his blanket fall into his lap. James handed him a pile of clothes and left the room again.

 

“How badly did you injure yourself, when you fell?” James asked over breakfast.

“It’s only a few bruises,” Q said, not looking up from his food. He closed his hand around the napkin on the table again and again, like it was going to run away at any moment.

In a trance James watched his fingers move as a continuous wave. “Let me take a look,” he said, snapping out of it, “You’re not qualified enough to assess the degree of your injuries.”

“So, you are a doctor then?”

“No, but I’ve seen a fair share of wounds,” James slid his hand over the table and rested it next to Q’s, “Just let me take a look. These things can be dangerous. Trust me.”

How could I, Q thought. Out loud he said, “Alright.” It was easier to conform  than to argue, so he stood up and unbuttoned his shirt. He did not let his gaze drop to meet James’, until he stood there with his bruised chest exposed.

James’ eyes glided over the sickly patterns, fingers hovering only inches from Q’s skin. “May I touch?”

Q nodded and tried not to flinch when James’ fingers came in contact with his aching skin. His eyes followed the fingers that smoothed over the bruises; prodded at the edges; grabbed and moved him bit by bit, until they broke away and Q realized he liked being touched. “What is your verdict Mr Bond?”

“Just a bruise,” James’ mouth quirked, “You’ll live.”

 

* * *

 

Q sat on the sitting room floor, gently blowing at a candle to see the flame flicker. The days passed faster outside the well, where excitement was never ending. But Q was exhausted from the onslaught of new things. He’d decided to stay inside to watch dusk creep over the hills and all along the sky while James went for a walk. And Q, although he would never admit it, didn’t feel safe walking outdoors after dark. All that open space, impossible to account for, made him nervous. Indoors and paying more attention to the sky than the ground, he didn’t spot Miss Moneypenny running towards the house.

“James?” she yelled, bursting through the door, “James sodding Bond, where are you?” She stopped in the threshold of the sitting room, staring at Q.

“I’m afraid he’s gone out,” said Q, heart rabbiting in his chest.

“Oh, dear Lord, you _are_ out!” Eve stepped closer to him with a large grin spreading on her face. “For heaven’s sake, let me embrace you!”

Q scrambled off the ground and found himself enclosed in a tight hug. He let his hands rest on Eve’s back and his eyes drift shut. Her hair tickled his face and Q decided no one would ever be better at the art of pleasantly annoying him than Eve Moneypenny.

She let go and he longed for the warmth, the breath rasping in his ear. “You’re taller than I expected.”

“You are warmer than I expected.”

Eve laughed, holding onto his shoulders. “I am human, not some sort of lizard, you know.”

“I’d find you very charming even as a reptile.”

“Am I interrupting something?” James asked, startling them both.

Eve only laughed harder, “You wish, old dog. Quite a lovely boy you’ve got here.”

Q hid his smile and excused himself to bed.

 

* * *

 

It was impossible for him to sleep. The moon hung low in the sky, a white sun in his window and it was driving Q mad. He was used to darkness, cold crammed darkness all around. Frustrated, he swung his legs over the side of the bed, brushing the floor with his toes before he set his feet against the floorboards. This world was over stimulating with its constantly changing degrees of too bright light.

“Can’t sleep. Can’t sleep,” he muttered, glaring at the moon, “Go away, I can’t sleep anymore!”

Q looked around the room for a place to hide. In one corner stood an armchair, in the other a wooden wardrobe. He picked the latter. Q opened the doors and began to toss out all the clothes. Once it was empty, he grabbed his blanket and climbed into the hollow space. He shut one door and crawled up in the space, body twisted into too tight angles. But it was familiarly dark with a wooden tinge. The moon, Q decided, was overrated.

 

He woke to a knock on the door as he did every morning. This time though he was disoriented and trapped, promptly hitting his head on the wardrobe door. James cracked the door of his room open at the sound of a pained moan.

“What on earth are you doing in the closet?” he asked.

Q rubbed his eyes and tried not to wince due to his stiff back. He pulled himself out of the confined space and sighed, “I can’t sleep in that bed.” He gestured around the room, “There’s too much space, too much light, too much everything to be able to rest.”

“So you decided to sleep in the closet instead?” James asked nonchalantly.

“I told you my manners were appalling. I did warn you.”

James shook his head, “You should have just said. There are other bedrooms and I could have fixed the curtains. You have to talk to me, Q. I can’t read minds.”

Q leaned his head back against the door. He didn’t want to say another word. He wanted to force the sun back down and not have to feel or see another thing.

“I mean it,” said James.

“I don’t like this,” Q whispered, “I don’t like it and I’m tired.”

 

* * *

 

On the first morning of November Q stood by the lakeside in a malicious wind. His fingers were numb from standing still in the ever cooling air as he gazed over the thin crust of ice on the water. This must be winter coming, he thought, so easy to spot with the world in front of him as an open book. Q deemed outside of the well everything was but a web of observations put together in the right order. A thrilling puzzle of actions and reactions.

Behind him a tree rustled desperately with the few rotten leaves still drooping from its branches. The sun hung lower than it had a month ago and Q decided he rather liked the way it crawled over the hills between dawn and dusk, not making an effort to rise high into the sky anymore. The rays barely warmed him. Q wiggled his ice dagger fingers; traced the barren, yellow tinted landscape with hungry eyes. He’d never tire of the spinning ellipses of shadows and light in the circadian cycle. The sun and the moon endlessly dancing around each other in the sky.

 

James Bond saw the boy from the well frozen at the shore of the lake. Q, he thought, did the most peculiar things. He stood still for hours at a time, licking the world with a lazy gaze. James could only wonder what there was to regard and hold his attention so fully and yet not at all. Q forgot his gloves, hated wearing shoes, sometimes slept curled up in an armchair instead of his bed. He sat on the floor and forgot to eat whenever he was engrossed in a book. James Bond did not know what to make of it, but he hoped Q would stay enchantingly wild forever.

Pulling on his gloves and coat, he headed outside. He grabbed some gravel from the driveway, tossing the stones in the air. Q’s trances were deep and he’d startled the boy often enough to take precautions. As he came closer to the lake, James tossed one stone after another into the lake.

 

Q was watching a screeching raven when he noticed the ice on the lake cracking up. His eyes snapped towards the source of the white lines and further to the man, who put them there. James dropped a hand full of gravel in resignation with a cheeky smile adorning his face. Q hadn’t known what to think of him for weeks now.

“Do you actually see the fish in the water, or why do you keep staring at it so intently?” James asked.

“I just do.”

“I see.” He did not.

They stood in silence, James glancing over to the water as Q continued to stare at him. Miss Moneypenny had told him, staring was impolite, but she’d also told him about small talk and Q fancied himself rubbish at both, so he didn’t even try. Instead he tried to memorize all the shades James’ eyes could be in broad daylight. “You don’t do small talk either then?” he asked, when the silence grew unbearable.

“No, I’ve never seen the point with you,” James turned his eyes back on him, “Besides, I doubt you’d know how to answer and we would both end up in an awkward situation.”

“Well, I cannot argue with that.”

“I’d wish you would talk to me regardless,” James sighed, “I see the way you look at things. I hear you laughing with Eve and I cannot fathom why you remain so silent in my company. Am I that intimidating? Am I strange somehow? Because we used to confess our every thought to one another.”

“How-” Q’s voice broke, “How am I supposed to do that, when I can’t trust you? You left me, James! I trusted you and then you left me. And I... I was so alone.”

“Q-”

“I don’t want to hear it,” he said, turning away.

James stood rooted to the spot and watched Q’s silhouette shrink into the distance.

 

* * *

 

James Bond poked at the fire in the fireplace to keep it alive, hoping Q would return soon. They’d been apart all afternoon and he knew there would be an abyss between them, even if they’d stand in the same room. It was still more comforting than knowing Q was out there alone as darkness began creeping into the valley like a disease.

Disease and poison, in their case distance and silence, had slowly infested their relationship and now the were rotting like a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean. Or dying like the fire he shoved more logs into. And if one asked Q the blame lay all on him, James thought, as he heard the front door creek tiredly on its hinges.

“Hello,” Q said, cheeks glowing red and fingers moonlight white from the cold.

James tried to recall the sentences he’d carved for hours. “How was your walk?”

“Cold.” There was no pretence, no elaboration to come.

“Look,” James said and Q did, “I am sorry for leaving, I truly am. But I am so bloody tired of being treated like I tossed you off a cliff, when I just tried to do my best in that situation. I really had no choices, Q; you’re smart enough to know that. And now I am back in a house that reeks of dust and death only to tiptoe around you as if we’re strangers.”

“So what, you want me to spill my heart out on the table and pretend the last three years didn’t happen? Do you even have the slightest inkling of how long three years are when you’re stuck in well?”

“Have you ever considered what the other side of the coin looked like? I was stuck in a city I hated amidst all that noise and smell! All those people, and not a single true friend. You had Eve. And she had you and I was just going bonkers all by myself in a city with thousands of people. You didn’t even breathe a word to me, just took all my letters and played the martyr brooding in that well. The world doesn’t revolve ‘round your feelings, Q,” he spat.

Calming down, James saw the hurt transpire in Q’s eyes. But then and there it was his turn to let out his emotions. It couldn’t get much worse anyway.

 

* * *

 

Q stared out of the window of his new bedroom, watching the leaves tumble from the trees, dancing in the wind. It was the middle of the afternoon, but the  sky was covered in clouds and they was awaiting rain. He lay down, tracing the orange floral patterns of the wallpaper the same way he used to trace the edges of the stones in the walls of his well after dark. His eyes followed his fingers over the spirals and spikes swirling up and down like leaves. Q closed his eyes and let his hands drift over the smooth walls. These pattern relied on being captured in the light. The wind blew over him through the open window.

And he couldn’t tell whether his skin had broken out in goosebumps from the cold or from how terrible he felt for what he’d said to James, even if he could not regret those words. After all they were both injured in their own ways and it had been the naked truth, bound to come out sooner or later. Q was tired of distrust lingering in the corners of this house, whispering to him at night. Exhausted and on the verge of tears, he fell asleep.

 

He woke alone to the sound of rain. Q watched the droplets race down his window with the last bits of grey light caught in their reflections. Now there was only him and James and all the unsolved issues floating between them. Maybe he could offer an apology, a lifeline. Anything. He snuck down the stairs barefoot, following the quiet sounds of life in the large house. James met him at the bottom of the staircase with a parcel in his hands.

“Evening,” James mumbled, looking away.

“Evening. What is that?”

“It’s a painting I purchased from the National Portrait Gallery. I often looked at it and thought you might have some regard for it.”

He unwrapped the artwork on his way to the sitting room, where the lighting was better and held it out to Q. “‘The Fighting Temeraire, a grand old war ship, being ignominiously hauled away to scrap,’ according to the lady at the gallery.”

“Quite melancholy,” Q said, tracing the sunset with his fingers, “The inevitability of time really, don’t you think?”

He looked up, “What do you see?”

“A bloody big ship.”

Q’s mouth quirked. “So, where will you hang it up?”

“What’s your favourite room?”

“Any room you’re in,” Q blushed, “Reminds me that you’re still here with me.”

“Shall I hang this in your bedroom then?”

“I’d rather you hung it up in yours, so you wouldn’t forget me.”

Q nibbled on the inside of his lip and reminded himself that he wasn’t tied by any social rules. “To be honest,” he said, “I get anxious whenever we are apart, even if it is my own doing. But that doesn’t mean I can slip right back into our old habits. That being said, I am truly sorry for what I said. It was not meant so harshly. I lashed out like a wounded animal, and perhaps that is what I am. I didn’t realise you were equally hurt.”

Q sighed, long and shuddering. “I’ll go back to bed now,” he whispered and stepped around James. Maybe someday they would heal.

 

* * *

 

When Q climbed down the stairs the next morning, he couldn’t help but wonder how the state of his and James’ relationship had shifted overnight. Yes, they’d stopped dancing around their problems, but ultimately it had been a finite leap. Magnitude undefined.

“Good morning.” Q seated himself at the kitchen table, where James was already sat reading a newspaper.

“Morning,” he muttered, “Did you sleep well?”

“Better than I have in a while.”

They made eye contact over the paper. Q wondered, if it served to bring barriers up or down. He decided to leave it up to James, who broke the silence with: “So, I will have to go visit Lady M today regarding the financial arrangements of my inheritance, which is currently mostly still in her hands. I trust you are capable of finding some interesting activities for the day yourself, so long as you stay out of the woods.”

“Oh, yes, I will manage myself. When will you be back?”

“At the very latest by dark, which should be around half four.”

Q made an affirmative sound and began to contemplate how he would spend the day. All he knew was that he’d take the opportunity to put one of the grandfather clocks to pieces to explore its mechanical heart and most definitely not think about James Bond.

 

Q jumped up from his seat on the sitting room floor, when he heard the door. Darkness had reigned for almost an hour without a sign of James Bond.

“Good god, I was so worried,” Q blurted out as soon as he saw James’ face in front of him. He froze on the spot, realising James had a limp and a torn coat. “What happened?”

“I fell off the horse. She’s a lot more stubborn than I remembered.”

Q rushed to help James out of his coat, the cool seeping into his fingertips from the wool. One sleeve was stained crimson, warm and wet like he imagined death to be. “Take your shirt off.”

“Excuse me?”

“Take it off. You are bleeding.” He tried to force his panic away. No one died from falling off a horse. He had after all  fallen into a well and survived, twice even.

James limped into the sitting room, unbuttoning his shirt as Q headed for the kitchen. He fumbled in the cabinets for any kind of liquor and a clean handkerchief. On second thought he grabbed a glass to go with the bottle.

“Sit,” he commanded, shoving james into a chair.

“Q, I can take care of myself.”

“Please, let me do this,” Q said, pouring the alcohol first into the glass and then onto the ‘kerchief, “It’s only fair.” He handed James the glass with a warning of the burning sensation before Q pressed the dripping cloth against the wound on his bicep.

James hissed in pain. “Rum is for drinking.”

“Then drink up.” Q tilted the glass gently against James’ lips with one hand, pressing down harder on the cloth with the other.

James grunted, leaning forward into Q’s neck. “Do you like this sort of thing then? Playing the tyrant nurse?”

Q said nothing. Had a hard time breathing with James’ panting hot air against his skin, while the alcohol stole the heat off his fingertips. Goodness gracious what have I gotten myself into. He pulled back, the words avoiding his mouth like the plague. All he saw was nearly transparent blue. Q knew the world was about to go under, two faces far too close to do anything else than collide. But soft lips against even softer ones could hardly be called collateral damage. Not until he’d suffocate from kissing James Bond anyway.

“Wow,” he breathed, breaking apart for air.

James Bond’s laugh felt like a warm satin sheet wrapping itself around his heart. The only thing reminding him of reality were his ice cold fingers.

 

* * *

 

James found Q lying on the sitting room floor, staring up at a grandfather clock. He blinked twice, wondering if his eyes weren’t cheating him. “What are you doing?” he asked as he had to do so often these days, because Q was a never ending conundrum. One with smooth lips and lively green eyes.

“Clocks are odd time keeping systems,” he muttered as if it was a self explanatory answer, “I don’t quite comprehend it, nor do I see the purpose, when you have such an elaborate system as the sky.”

“It’s too early for this,” James mumbled to himself, because Q was wholly engrossed with a clock to reward him with even a crumb of undivided attention. Regardless of this, he sat on the wrong side of the breakfast table to keep an eye on the madman. To James a fascinated Q was the most beautiful thing on the planet and he couldn’t wait to have those eyes turn on him.

 

“What for do you look at me like that?” Q asked half an hour later, head snapping to the side.

“Why I’m surprised you even noticed.”

“I take notice of _everything_ observable, Mr Bond, including the bags under your eyes.”

“Can you also tell what robbed me of sleep?”

“Do you _really_ want me to?” Q’s voice dripped of feigned innocence and James wondered when he’d turned into such a cunning temptor.

Offering his hand to the boy, he asked, “If I said yes, would you tell me?”

Q pulled himself up, face only inches from James’. “My lips. Whether repulsion or enchantment is not something I know of, though I would venture for the second.” The answer was his usual point blank honesty.

James couldn’t stop the smile on his lips, nor could he stay any longer without giving himself away. “Take this apart,” he pressed his pocket watch into Q’s palm, “It might give you some insight on the workings of time. But don’t break it.”

“Why? Is it as fragile as your heart?”

“It is at least as precious as yours.” James Bond found himself playing a game in which he didn’t know if he wanted to win or lose. He did know he wanted Q.

 

* * *

 

James had never understood those odd few days between Christmas festivities and New Year’s. Four regular days filled with eternal boredom of visiting house after house and leftover food was all he remembered from his childhood days. On the 28th of December as he watched Q’s pallid skin taint orange in the warm glow of the fireplace, James Bond thought there was no other purpose to those days than to spend every waking moment committing one’s loved ones features to memory.

The way Q’s eyes glimmered with no colour and a dangerous amount of light, the concaves and hollows of his body, bones sticking out at frightening angles, all whilst Q seemed content poking the fire with a stick. He was level with the flames, curled into himself on the rug, shyness contrasted by a curiosity so tempting, it transformed him into an enigma. Q in his unadulterated state was both slow burning and a volatile combustion like the drag of blood into a heart and the inevitable contraction pushing it out. All this in a single, everlasting heartbeat. James Bond drank up every last sight of the young man on his sitting room floor the same way the fire consumed oxygen.

“It’s almost midnight,” he said into the quiet bristle of the fire.

Q, instead of turning instinctively towards the clock, turned instinctively to James like a re-orienting sunflower. “So? You live your life according to the clock. I live mine according to the sun and a new day does not break, until the sun rises from over there.” He pointed east with his stick.

“And it ends in the sun setting, I know. But what does one do with the time in between the two? What is that supposed to be?”

“Is everything something?”

“Matter or vacuum. Pick one or the other and don’t play dumb.”

“Oh, you know what I mean.” Q’s voice was cotton soft, his smile barely there.

“Well, if the sun set ages ago and this is just floating around in a void, I may as well go to bed now. Wake me up when dawn creeps on the horizon, for I can’t see a thing in the dark.”

With his head propped on his knee, Q watched James’ figure morph into the shadows.

 

His knuckles hit the door and the wood protested as solids did, when touched. Minds and bodies, at least his, were not among them. At the muffled ‘come in’ his heart either leapt or stumbled, Q could not tell. Closing the door after him, he held up James’ pocket watch as a peace offering.

James took it unceremoniously, eyes fixed on Q’s. “Thank you. What now?”

“Now I go lay down, or don’t.” Q knew the door was only an inch from his back and James Bond too close.

“Will you stay?”

“If you want me to.”

James’ breaths were as steady as pouring rain. “Is there no way around this at all? Won’t you have me, unless I express all my deepest affections for you?”

“Well, I will have you know that I have spent the past twelve years preoccupied with you. Since I know a mere two people that won’t be a surprise. However, you cross my mind in your presence and absence - do not flatter yourself, please - and as if it weren’t enough, you continue to haunt me in my dreams. So I shan’t have anything more of you in the living flesh without a sincere and heavy word of admiration.”

“But don’t you know,” exclaimed James, “you sleep within these very walls in the frames of that bloody painting on the walls every night! I wake at ungodly hours to the hum of the wind, thinking, even wishing, it was you, who whispering in my ear. It’s unreasonable to think my heart beats for any other reason than loving you.”

Dumbstruck, Q forgot about the purpose of the heart he had commended Eve Moneypenny on. Instead he blurted, “You love me? But what for?”

“Is it not obvious?” James turned away and strode to the window. He fixed his gaze far into darkness, the sky too clouded to see a clear form. “You must be simultaneously the most enchanting and vexing creature I’ve had the good fortune of knowing. There is no denying you are wild, nothing else is to be expected really, but sometimes I catch you so fully engaged with something the gleam in your eyes is almost feral with a sort of rabid hunger to see even the most trivial things in the world.

“You have no manners, but the rules you break seem to exist solely to fall to that fate. Anything you have set your mind to, you seem to achieve, may it be the understanding of the mechanics in a pocket watch or learning the irregularly conjugated verbs of the french language. I consider myself lucky to hold even a single second of your attention.

“But tell me in all honesty,” he begged, turning to Q, “have you ever felt the slightest affection for me and if so, are you willing to act on it?”

“I spent three years trapped in a well without you to talk to and I can confess they have been the loneliest of my entire life. I’d be a fool to consider anyone else, when you feel the way you do. Am not sure I could, even if you didn’t. So, I shall stay then?”

“And don’t dare leave till morning breaks.”

“Perhaps never at all.”

 

That night both of them slept erratic bits of time here and there, lying together in the darkness. Q pressed his lips between James’ shoulder blades, forehead against the heated skin. He considered how he’d never consciously felt warmth this way before. He’d never been touched in the well, had never touched in the well. Q wrapped his arms tighter around James’ chest.

“You’re suffocating me,” the other whispered, “though I’m sure your reasons are good.”

Q smiled into his skin, muttering “You know, my days may end in sunsets and begin with sunrises, but I quite like the undefined darkness in between the two.”

James unwound Q’s arm from himself and turned around. He draw patterns on Q’s palms, fingers slipping over their edges in the dark. He could not see a thing and yet he was more aware of Q’s every move than ever. From time to time a heartbeat jolted beneath his finger. “Then you must hate the world in an hour or so, for I believe the sun will rise today as it has always risen before.”

“Why should I despise the sun for rising, when I know it will set with the same certainty as it breaches the sky in the morning. Besides, the daylight will colour your eyes and characterize your smirk, for now your face is all shadowy planes.” Q kissed him once before he continued, “I shall always see the best in you, regardless of the positions of the sun and the moon. You may like to keep time, but neither I nor love are fond of the practise.”

James Bond could not conjure a sentence, so he poured all he wanted to say into a tight embrace. With Q buried against him he fell asleep again, no longer worried about the celestial body creeping up behind the hills in the east.

 

* * *

 

Q walked outside in the satin soft snow. The sun dyed the clouds a light rose shade and the sky an equally delicate blue and he marveled at the lightheartedness of the sky on such a cold winter morning. The softness of the sight was so at odds with the harsh wind, turning snowflakes into daggers. His sights were set on the nearby hill, leading to the lows and his well. He hadn’t climbed it since the snow had fallen and even before that he’d never ventured downhill. Today, he’d decided against it. He had sat in the parlour by sunrise, reading Major Boothroyd’s latest book on dynamics, when he understood the full contrast between the life he read the first book in and the one he was reading in now. And Q felt obliged to go pay one last tribute to his prison of a dozen years.

He stood beside the last pine tree stubbornly stretching its green branches towards the sky. Before him lay a valley, which resembled a graveyard of stiff trees. Their shed leaves lay buried beneath the snow. Knowing he could not get lost, Q headed down the hill towards that ghostly sight.

He ducked beneath branches, pushed others out of the way. Some scratched his face and in return he snapped them in two. There the wishing well stood the same way it must have on the night he’d fallen into it and on the night he’d climbed out. Q had never properly seen it from the outside and he thought himself lucky for it. It looked too small to once have been his home, just two and a half feet in height of bulky stones with an old wooden roof on top. He thought himself estranged from the place, but as he glanced in he saw a red felt at the bottom. He’d sat down there for years, knew it of course, and yet he could not quite recall how.

James had seen this intricate world in all its detail, while Q had watched the light fade and intensify in its daily cycles, thinking there mustn’t be much to see outside. But Q knew he would not find it half as interesting had he not lived in oblivion for so many years. At least he had lived, and only because James Bond happened to throw a coin into a wishing well one day. The line between living and dying seemed to be one drawn by chance anyway. He had just happened to be on the right side of it and now he slept with a silver coin under his pillow.

“Till we meet again, old friend.” He turned back towards Skyfall. His heart fluttered in his chest without the restraint of ever lingering melancholy. On the hilltop the sun hit his face. Panting, he decided to sit down and lean against the first pine on this side of the lows to enjoy the view. On the other side of the lake James galloped through the snow on his new horse. Q saw him only as a little figurine, but it was enough for him to beam in the face of a frigid winter day.

 

* * *

 

 

Late January daylight cast colourful beams through the chapel windows. Q sat in the midst of a pattern with a block of paper, drawing up a letter. He wished he could capture the colours onto the sheet too, but they were purely conditional. His words were scarce; it was the third day he was writing the same piece. If he was honest, he’d spent more time staring at the walls than composing the letter.

“Yoohoo,” Eve startled him out of his thoughts, “I did not know you took pleasure in coming to the chapel. Though it seems you rather do not care for its intended purpose.”

“Oh please, you are only here to escape the cold,” he stated flatly without moving his feet from the next row.

“What are you doing anyway?”

“Composing a letter.”

“To?”

“Take a guess Miss Moneypenny. I’ll even give you a hint: It is not for you.”

“Don’t _try_ to be clever. It demeans your true wit.” She seated herself sideways on the row before his. “Why would you write him a letter now?”

“I have written him letters all along. I simply never sent them.”

She could not hide her surprise. “Rather cruel, is it not?”

“No more than his conduct was. What about you? Have you always been within the boundaries of kindness with the men you flirt?”

“It is hardly the same. Besides, things have changed and you know.”

He hummed, “So you will marry the Governor then?”

“If he makes me an offer I shan’t reject it, but if he does not I shan’t cry a tear over it.”

“Quite the development from Villiers. You would have eloped with him in a heartbeat. A desperate one at that too.”

“The affair was quite different, Q. As a woman my only means of gaining any independence, financially or socially, is to marry. So, I shall not make the same mistake twice and you shall not breathe a word of this to James. Promise?”

“Promise. Now leave me to my letter please.”

“Alright, alright,” she laughed and made haste to get out.

 

* * *

 

In the early morning hours, with grey light streaming through the darkness, Q set a box onto the breakfast table. On top of it he left a note, which read:

 

_James,_

_after you left for London I once promised myself in a fit of anger that I’d never write you a letter in my lifetime. Today, I break that promise, but not for the first time. You once picked bluebells for me and I stuck them into the cracks of the walls. But, when you left later that afternoon, I plucked them all out and pressed them between the pages of_ The Little Mermaid _. Have now kept them within the envelopes of your letters. With them rest my responses, unsent and unseen. An act of extreme selfishness I knew already then and I know it still. But you shall have them all along with this letter now, packed in a box with my sincerest apologies. This is the confession I had to make before I could tell you about all the things I can’t say out loud._

_That having been said, it has come to my attention (a few days ago), by accident, that a relation between two persons of the same sex is highly imprudent. I shall not care for propriety on my account, for I neither wish to please people, nor are there any whom I could insult by accident. To you however this must have been obvious from the start. Surely you, a man of good fortune and looks, must be wanted by a fair amount of young ladies and yet you chose to make love to me. Forgive me, but I cannot fathom why, if it is not for some ratchet intentions. For my own part, there is no point in hiding my true feelings anymore. If I have already made a fool out of myself, I may do so now, knowingly and at least comfort myself with the notion that I have laid down all there is before it is no more._

 

 

His heart pounded a violent concert in his chest as he let go of the box. Forcing himself to get dressed and quit the house, Q managed to breathe again. His hands sweat and froze simultaneously as the cool air lapped at them. Thousands of snowflakes glittered in the sunlight as bright as stars in the sky. He leaned against the chilly stone walls of the house and closed his eyes. The cold seeped through his coat the same way the air forced itself deep into his lungs. Q reminded himself there was no reason to panic and began to walk towards the lake.

 

The ice had thinned over the past few weeks. It had turned dark and split into rough edged rafts. Q watched them bob on the water surface, float into one another and apart again with crystal clear water splashing out here and there. The waters mirrored his own unsettled state.

He knew he had not done anything wrong, at least not knowingly, and that he could not be ashamed of his feelings. Yet, he feared for his and James’ relationship. The words he had tried to think of with such care felt wrong now and he hoped they would not break them apart like the ice on the lake. Not only would his heart shatter, he’d have nowhere to go.

Time stretched out into a painfully slow crawl, but when he heard the tell tale crunch of footsteps, it wrapped around itself till the wait was as short as a single moment in time. Tears sprung to his eyes, and Q thought himself ridiculous for it, but he could not help feeling as though he was about to suffocate. Bearing the suspense no longer, he turned around. “Tell me whatever you have to say at once, Bond. I have grown hateful of waiting around for things all my life.”

“Very well,” said he, stopping next to Q. He clasped his hands behind his back and gazed over the same things Q had moments earlier. “I am grieved to hear you think I am capable of such ill conduct and I did not mean to upset you. I did not feel as though I was deceiving you, since my feelings towards you have always been sincere and therefore nothing else should be of any consequence. I am not a good man, nor do I fancy myself brave, however I have always had the best intentions when it came to you. But can and will you believe it of me?”

“You know my answer to that, James. You know it well. Do not tease me any longer. What is to become of us now?”

James took off his gloves and grabbed Q’s cold hands. “Anything, Q. We shall be anything you desire, so long as the sun rises and falls along with our chests. So long as your heart beats for mine and mine for yours, if not beyond.”

James slipped his own gloves onto Q’s numb fingers and together they stood, hand in hand, in the last cold winter winds. “You know,” James whispered, pressing his lips to Q’s curls, “if I could I would marry you.”

The tears Q had so stubbornly been holding back fell and he could not help but laugh; his greatest fortune in life had been to fall into an abandoned wishing well and his greatest misfortune to ever have thought it to be one.

 

* * *

  

 

_March 19th - 27th 1858, Skyfall Chapel_

_James, my love,_

__

_Watched you from the kitchen window this morning with my feet drawn off the icy floorboards and tried to translate my love for you from heartbeats to words of the English language. Came to the conclusion there is not enough paper to encompass it in scribbles of black ink on white planes, so I’ve decided to hand you a shorter version of you within the world or this world within in you - never could make sense which way around it goes - from my perspective._

_I shall start with the well, since it is where our lives intertwined and I’d be lying, if I told you I do not still think about it often. You know what you know and the rest shall remain a mystery, but this what I will let you know:  The bottom of the well carries it’s own kind of darkness similar to the one at the bottom of the river. It’s the colour of your eyes in the crooked shadows of night and sometimes I wonder if it’s all just an illusion. Sometimes when we kiss I think everything is anyway. You steal my oxygen; I steals yours and we call it a draw, heads spinning in the strange gravitational field of dizziness and I never quite know which one of us laughs first. I don’t even know whether it’s an action and reaction of two souls knotted into one or if we walk our own paths to the same crossings over and over again like planets aligning in the solar system. Either way, as long as your eyes meet mine in the dark, I find it does not matter much. And if they one day did not then that’s something I don’t wish to know today._

_It’s a new day - my words don’t flow onto these pages the same way they run through my mind - and this is a brand new story. It begins with a silver coin like ours and ends with a boy in a well escaping it one September night. That same night was the beginning of the tale we live in now. It was resurrection, an elevation to a new life in a new world with different limitations. Here I like to pretend I was never lonely. There is me and there is you, somehow utterly out of place together._

_But it is enough to live on, to love, to giggle breathlessly in the dark as the moon drips white light into the bedroom. Somewhere high up the concave sky wraps around the world satin soft and speckled with starburst patterns and in the deadest moments of the night the spectrum of my affections reaches from that ice cold light to the unfeasibly matte darkness in between; a distance so great, it can’t ever be measured in anything else than the infinite silence of the draw between two heartbeats. Listen to yours every night; it’s a lullaby. My heart beats and echo to yours and yours to mine. Have always wondered which one fell into the habit first._

_What I do know is that I kissed you first and you kissed me next, and since then I have lost track. Told you once in the earliest morning hour that love does not like to keep time. I don’t think even time likes to keep itself, but you all believe it runs in a straight line, when it really folds over again and again. Ultimately those two invisible quantities run in circles though (circadian where we stand) and I never told you that. The earth spins; skies creeping from one horizon line to the other; colours tinting the open space in muted pastels. You think in the space between dawn and dusk, I in the space between dusk and dawn, and everything in between mutual territory like the space under the covers. Linen sheets wrinkle the same way time does as it bends from nightfall to the first rays morning light and your skin always smells just a little bit of sweat, salty like the sea in the painting on the wall. I often watch its rich, oily sunset come to live by sunrise. If you still need it, there’s your light on the horizon, for the sun never does set in that moment in time._

__

_Yours ever,_

_Q_

  

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short note on the Fighting Temeraire: It came into the collection of The National Gallery in 1856 along with quite a few other of Turner's works, so it does in that sense fit the storyline in this fic. However, we all know it continues to be with The National Gallery today still (and it had travelled the world too).
> 
> I have also generally tried to fact check the existence of certain items in this fic. This doesn't apply to physical and chemical theorems that are mentioned throughout and may thus be historically somewhat inaccurate. The are mostly used as metaphors and such. All remaining mistakes are my own.
> 
> On one last note there will be an artwork for the very end of this story, which is not quite finished yet, so it will be added in a few days.

**Author's Note:**

> The bit Q is reading to James, when he's fallen asleep by the well is the beginning of the Little Mermaid. All other mentions of fictional works in this chapter are completely made up.


End file.
